Quote:Phone hacking: email to James Murdoch was deleted

An email in which James Murdoch was told of allegations that phone hacking was "rife" at the News of the World was deleted from his personal account days before Scotland Yard opened a new investigation into the company.

By Mark Hughes, Crime Correspondent 6:30AM GMT 01 Feb 2012

The chairman of News International was forwarded a chain of emails suggesting that hacking was not restricted to a single rogue reporter. They included one from Colin Myler, the editor of the News of the World at the time, after it emerged that a second journalist had sent an email with details of a hacked conversation. He warned Mr Murdoch that "it is as bad as we feared".

Mr Murdoch claims he did not read the email in full and was unaware of the suggestion that hacking went beyond one "rogue reporter".

Yesterday, however, it was disclosed that the email was deleted from his account by an IT worker at News International 11 days before Scotland Yard launched Operation Weeting.

Mr Myler's copy of the message was also lost from the email server that held News International emails following a "hardware failure". The deletions meant that the email did not form part of the initial evidence sent by News International to the Metropolitan Police.

It was not discovered until last year when a hard copy was found in a box containing material taken from Mr Myler's office following the closure of the News of the World.

The evidence handed over by News International in January 2011 prompted a new investigation into phone hacking that led to 17 arrests.

Many of the arrests include current or former News International employees who have been arrested on the strength of emails and evidence handed to police by the company.

Mr Murdoch was sent the email detailing a hacking claim by Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the Professional Footballers' Association, on June 7, 2008.

Mr Myler describes Mr Taylor's case against the paper and requests a meeting with Mr Murdoch. The News International chairman replies two minutes later agreeing to the meeting, but has subsequently claimed he had not had time to read the email in full.

Linklaters, a law firm representing News International, has written to the Commons culture, media and sport committee saying that the email was deleted on Jan 15 2011. Operation Weeting began 11 days later.

The deletion is thought to have happened during or shortly after News International's internal trawl of emails, the results of which were passed to the police.

In a letter to the committee, John Turnbull of Linklaters said: "Mr Murdoch's copy of the email was deleted from his mailbox by a member of News International's IT department on Jan 15 2011 as part of [an] email stabilisation and modernisation programme.

"Mr Myler's copy of the email was lost from the email archive system in a hardware failure that occurred on Mar 18 2010. The email archive system was subject to many such incidents."

A spokesman for News International declined to comment. In a separate letter to the committee, Mr Murdoch said: "I wish to confirm again that I was not aware of evidence of widespread wrongdoing and did not seek to conceal it."

Last month, News International was accused of a "cover-up" of phone hacking evidence by a High Court judge after lawyers for phone hacking victims said the company had deleted emails.

Mr Justice Vos told the company he had seen evidence that raised "compelling questions about whether you concealed, told lies, actively tried to get off scot free."

Quote:Met police accepts failure to warn phone-hacking victims was unlawful

Police admit legal obligation was breached after phone-hacking victims including John Prescott bring judicial review proceedings

Amelia Hill
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 7 February 2012 13.16 GMT


The Metropolitan police have formally admitted that they were wrong not to warn victims and potential victims of phone hacking that their privacy had been, or might have been, invaded.

Chris Bryant MP, the former deputy prime minister Lord Prescott, the former Met deputy assistant commissioner Brian Paddick, Ben Jackson and an anonymous claimant, HJK, brought judicial review proceedings to challenge the police over failures to warn them their phones had been hacked. They also challenged the police over failures to properly investigate their claims of hacking.

The claim, brought in 2010, was vigorously defended but after the new police investigation into phone hacking, and revelations about the evidence in the hands of the police at the time of the first investigation, the police have finally accepted they breached a legal obligation to warn the phone-hacking victims in 2006 and 2007.

Prescott, who was at the royal courts of justice in London, welcomed the outcome but said it had taken him 19 months to "finally get justice".

"Time and again I was told by the Metropolitan police that I had not been targeted by Rupert Murdoch's News of the World. But I refused to accept this was the case," he said. "Thanks to this judicial review, the Metropolitan police has finally apologised for its failure to inform victims of the criminal acts committed by the News of the World against myself and hundreds of other victims of phone hacking."

Lord Justice Gross and Mr Justice Irwin heard that the two sides had reached agreement on the wording of the declaration.

Bryant said he was "delighted that the Metropolitan police are finally admitting that they should have notified not just me but all the thousands of victims of the News of the World's criminality".

"As I have always maintained this has been a three-headed scandal," he said. "First there was the mass criminality, then there was the massive cover-up and then, from 2007 on, the inexplicable failure of the Met properly to investigate the News of the World or even interrogate the material that they had gathered from [private investigator] Glenn Mulcaire."

Bryant said the Met had "perpetuated the News International 'rogue reporter' myth, let down the victims of this crime and let many of the criminals get away with it. It's a sadness that it has taken all this time to get the Met to admit that they should have notified all the victims and that we had to go to court to secure that admission."

The declaration constitutes an admission by the police that their failure to warn victims that their privacy was or may have been unlawfully invaded was a breach of article 8 of the European convention on human rights, which provides that "everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence".

Tamsin Allen, of Bindmans LLP, who represented the claimants alongside Hugh Tomlinson QC and Alison Macdonald, said the court's decision meant the "legal obligation to warn victims of privacy violations in the phone-hacking case has now been made clear".

"But at the time of the first investigation into phone hacking, instead of warning the hundreds or thousands of victims of voicemail interceptions, the police made misleading statements which gave comfort to News International and permitted the coverup to continue.

"If the police had complied with their obligations under the Human Rights Act in the first place, the history of the phone-hacking scandal would have been very different."

The judicial review was instigated in September 2010 when the police claimed all victims of phone hacking had been given appropriate information and the retired Met assistant commissioner Andy Hayman had written in the Times and the News of the World that there were only a handful of victims and that "no stone had been left unturned" in the handling of the investigation.

But the claimants argued there had been a failure to notify victims, or to give them full and accurate information when they requested it, or to conduct an effective investigation.

The claim was defended on the basis that the claimants were not victims of phone hacking and had been given all relevant information.

That, it transpired, was not true and the Met has now apologised to each of them individually.

The truth is that in August 2006 the police seized a vast amount of documentation containing the names and private information of thousands of people targeted by the royal editor at the News of the World, Clive Goodman, and Mulcaire, and information about numerous other journalists who may have been involved. Lawyers for the claimants said that at one stage the police decided to ensure all victims were warned. "But instead of doing so they sat on the documents and evaded questions from people who suspected they were being hacked," said Allen.

The Metropolitan police said it was "pleased to have reached an agreement in this case and accepts that more should have been done by police in relation to those identified as victims and potential victims of phone hacking several years ago.

"It is a matter of public record that the unprecedented increase in anti-terrorist investigations resulted in the parameters of the original inquiry being tightly drawn and officers considered the prosecution and conviction of Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire as a successful outcome of their investigation."

In a statement, the Met press bureau added that the fact that there were now more than 130 officers involved in the current phone-hacking inquiry Operation Weeting and the two operations being run in conjunction with it "in part reflects the lessons that have been learned about how police should deal with the victims of such crimes".

Tuesday's settlement does not mean damages will be paid by the Met and the court made clear that it sets no precedent for the future. This was welcomed by the police.

"How the MPS treats victims goes to the very heart of what we do," the Met statement said. "It was important that this case did not result in such a wide duty being placed on police officers that it could direct them away from their core purpose of preventing and detecting crime."

Quote:Harry Redknapp trial: police accused of leaking case to News of the World

Redknapp's defence QC suggested that information was leaked from the City of London police to sports journalist Rob Beasley

Press Association
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 8 February 2012 13.20 GMT

The senior detective shouted at by Harry Redknapp for "staring" had faced accusations police were leaking details of the case to the News of the World.

The now defunct Sunday tabloid's conversations with both Redknapp and his co-accused, Milan Mandaric, formed a central part of the prosecution.

But the defence QC John Kelsey-Fry attempted to get the evidence thrown out, claiming the "press is effectively conducting a satellite investigation".

Both Detective Inspector Dave Manley and the sports journalist Rob Beasley denied City of London police was the "source".

Beasley instead said he paid several thousand pounds to someone close to Redknapp.

There had been simmering tension between the Tottenham Hotspur manager and officers since a dawn raid on his Dorset home that was watched by press photographers.

Redknapp told how his wife, Sandra, thought he must have been killed in a plane crash after looking out of the window to see the flashbulbs of photographers.

The manager was further enraged by the volume of information Beasley had obtained when they spoke to each other on the eve of the 2009 League Cup final between Spurs and Manchester United.

Kelsey-Fry said during legal argument that Beasley's intentions were "repugnant".

But during evidence heard in the absence of the jury, the judge, Anthony Leonard, dismissed the QC's submissions that the evidence was "evasive, contradictory and manifestly unreliable".

The judge also ruled out a later bid by Kelsey-Fry to have the case thrown out altogether.

During questioning with Manley, a senior officer on the case, the barrister said: "It is, I suggest, blindingly obvious that there was a leak from your organisation, from somewhere within your investigating authority."

Manley replied: "I would like to find out what happened. I would like to know that information. It remains a mystery. People in football talk to the media on a daily basis."

Kelsey-Fry added: "Mr Beasley told the court that he believed that both Mr Mandaric and Mr Redknapp were actually under investigation and subject to an ongoing investigation, and he was going to interview them on what he understood to be the same matter.

"There is a distance between what they said in interviews with police and what evidence is brought and what they mentioned subsequently. The evidence is simply overwhelming.

"Mr Beasley's evidence cannot properly be relied upon. It's evasive, contradictory and manifestly unreliable. I can't find any other situation where the press is effectively conducting a satellite investigation.

"The reality is that Mr Beasley is very much better informed about what was going on than they were. What he set out to do is not only unattractive, it is quite … repugnant."

While he was giving evidence, Redknapp shouted at Manley.

Gesturing across the courtroom, Redknapp said: "Mr Manley, will you please stop staring at me. I know you are trying to cause me a problem, OK."

Quote:Senior Sun journalists arrested in police payments probe
Deputy editor, chief correspondent and picture editor among five Sun newspaper staff and three others arrested

David Batty, Damien Pearse and agencies
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 11 February 2012 11.15 GMT Article history


The Sun has been plunged into crisis following the arrest of five of its most senior journalists, including the deputy editor, over allegations of inappropriate payments to police and public officials.

The five Sun journalists are understood to be: deputy editor Geoff Webster, picture editor John Edwards, chief reporter John Kay, chief foreign correspondent Nick Parker and reporter John Sturgis.

A News International source said that the Sun editor, Dominic Mohan, was "not resigning" but added that it was "obviously a dramatic day for him".

A Surrey police officer, 39, a Ministry of Defence employee, 39, and a member of the armed forces, 36, were also arrested at their homes on Saturday on suspicion of corruption, misconduct in a public office and conspiracy in relation to both.

The new arrests at Britain's bestselling newspaper will further rock News International, which is still reeling from the closure of the Sun's sister title, the News of the World last year, after it emerged that journalists had hacked the phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler.

The journalists, aged between 45 and 68, were arrested at addresses in London, Kent and Essex on suspicion of corruption, aiding and abetting misconduct in a public office, and conspiracy in relation to both these offences. They are being questioned at police stations in London and Kent.

News Corporation, the parent company of News International which owns the Sun and the Times, confirmed that five Sun staff were among those arrested today.

It said its Management and Standards Committee (MSC) had provided information to the Elveden investigation which led to the arrests and had also provided the option of "immediate legal representation" to those arrested.

"News Corporation remains committed to ensuring that unacceptable news-gathering practices by individuals in the past will not be repeated and last summer authorised the MSC to co-operate with the relevant authorities," it said.

"The MSC will continue to ensure that all appropriate steps are taken to protect legitimate journalistic privilege and sources, private or personal information and legal privilege.

"News Corporation maintains its total support to the ongoing work of the MSC and is committed to making certain that legitimate journalism is vigorously pursued in both the public interest and in full compliance with the law."

The arrests come two weeks after four former and current Sun journalists and a serving Metropolitan police officer were arrested over alleged illegal police payments.

Senior Sun employees Chris Pharo, 42, and Mike Sullivan, along with former executives Fergus Shanahan, 57, and Graham Dudman, were named by sources as suspects facing corruption allegations. All five were released on bail.

Surrey police confirmed a serving officer was arrested at the officer's home address on Saturday as part of Operation Elveden.

A spokesman said: "Surrey police has been working closely with Operation Elveden since it was established in 2011, with a number of its officers seconded to the [Metropolitan Police Service] to assist with the investigations.

"On learning about the involvement of one of its officers, the force immediately referred the matter to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC)."

Assistant Chief Constable Jerry Kirkby said: "The force takes matters of this nature extremely seriously and we will not hesitate to respond robustly to allegations where there is evidence to support them."

Deborah Glass, deputy chair of the IPCC, said: "Today's arrests are further evidence of the strenuous efforts being undertaken to identify police officers who may have taken corrupt payments."

The MoD refused to comment.

Officers from Operation Elveden made the arrests between 6am and 8am as part of the investigation into allegations of inappropriate payments to police and public officials.

Operation Elveden, which runs alongside the Met's Operation Weeting team, was launched as the phone-hacking scandal erupted last July with allegations about the now-defunct News of the World targeting Milly Dowler's mobile phone.

Its remit has widened to include the investigation of evidence uncovered in relation to suspected corruption involving public officials who are not police officers.

All home addresses of all eight detained men are being searched and officers are also carrying out searches at the offices of News International in Wapping, east London, the Metropolitan police said. "

Quote:The Sun's Trevor Kavanagh: News Corp team 'boasting' over help to police

War of words at publisher intensifies as paper's associate editor tells of 'unease' at role of internal inquiry

Lisa O'Carroll
guardian.co.uk, Monday 13 February 2012 15.30 GMT

Parts of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation have been boasting about handing information to police that has led to the arrests of 10 journalists at the Sun, one of the tabloid's most senior staff said on Monday.

Trevor Kavanagh, the paper's associate editor, told BBC Radio 5 Live that the mood on the paper was "despondent" and there was "a feeling of being under siege". Appearing on the Richard Bacon show, he added: "There has never been a bigger crisis than this."

In a clear swipe against News Corp's powerful Management and Standards Committee, Kavanagh said "there is certainly a mood of unhappiness that the company proudly, certain parts of the company not News International I hasten to add, not the newspaper side of the operation actually boasting that they are sending information to police that has put these people I have just described into police cells."

News Corp's MSC was set up last year in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal to co-operate with police investigations into hacking and allegations of corrupt payments to public officials. The arrests of Sun journalists comes after the MSC reconstructed an email archive of 300m messages and turned over parts of that archive to the police, providing the information that led to five arrests of Sun journalists last weekend as well as four last month and one last year.

In a tour of broadcast studios at lunchtime, Kavanagh launched a staunch defence of journalists on the tabloid, claiming that they were treated worse than terrorists and that the police now had more officers 171 in total investigating News International than they did on the Milly Dowler case or the Lockerbie terrorist attack.

He told Radio 4's World at One there was concern about the way in which the MSC is handing over information to the police. "I think it's fair to say that there is unease about the way that some of the best journalists in Fleet Street have ended up being arrested on evidence that the MSC has handed to the police" he told Radio 4's World at One.

His remarks are being seen as a sign that Murdoch's British publishing operation is sliding into civil war, with journalists on the Sun and the Times furious with they way they believe their bosses are "throwing journalists to the lion's den". This morning Kavanagh who had been considered close to Rupert Murdoch penned an opinion piece for the Sun titled "Witch-hunt has put us behind ex-Soviet states on free press".

Kavanagh said the police operation was "completely out of proportion", with as many as 20 officers turning up at one journalist's home on Saturday. He said he suspected police were trying to recover their own reputation after failing to investigate the original allegations of phone hacking.

"They lost a police commissioner, they've lost a deputy police commissioner and they now want to make it abundantly clear that they aren't going to leave a single stone, floorboard, drawer, cupboard, Kellogg's packet or any other part of the household untouched," he said.

Kavanagh said that no one is opposed to co-operation with the police and that the company should hand over information when appropriate, but it was up to the police to sift through the 300m emails and hordes of other documents, not the MSC.

He said 30 current and former News International journalists have now been suspended with no evidence of wrongdoing and no arrests, yet their careers could now be destroyed.

Kavanagh's column in the Sun on Monday protested that police were treating staff on the paper like "members of an organised crime gang".

On Radio 4 he denounced declarations two weeks ago that the MSC was charged with "draining the swamp". He added: "I think that's an appalling suggestion and it's resented bitterly and deeply by those many excellent journalists who have worked loyally for the company for most of their working lives.

"The point is you have people being raided by up to 20 police officers at a time when they are still in bed at home and they are having their children's underwear drawers searched by policemen who in fact are being seconded from sensitive terrorist units at a time when we are trying to prepare for the Olympic games and the potential of a mass suicide attack," he said.

He told Adam Boulton of Sky News that the News of the World staff had already paid a high price for alleged wrongdoing at News International and that the police were now going to the other extreme after failing to investigate original allegations over phone hacking.

Kavanagh said closing the Sun would be "surely the ultimate disproportionate act". He added: "I think there's no justification on the basis of what you and I know so far for any such precipitate and disastrous decision. I think it would be a catastrophe for British media and newspapers worldwide and even possibly for the BBC if action which at this stage suggests no actual guilt should be regarded as grounds for closing newspapers."

In the Sun newsroom there is a sense of anger and despair. "Any of us could be arrested, we just don't know," said one insider who asked not to be named.

Another said: "The company has a legal duty of care to its staff. These people work anti-social hours, work overtime without question, miss family occasions for this paper. It's all very well to have the sympathy of your direct boss but when the overall company doesn't give a toss, that counts for nothing. There is going to be a backlash when Murdoch arrives here later this week."

Quote:defence QC John Kelsey-Fry attempted to get the evidence thrown out, claiming the "press is effectively conducting a satellite investigation".

Both Detective Inspector Dave Manley and the sports journalist Rob Beasley denied City of London police was the "source".

Beasley instead said he paid several thousand pounds to someone close to Redknapp.

Quote:Scotland Yard's investigation into the alleged hacking of computers on behalf of News International's newspapers has dramatically switched to Northern Ireland.

The Met officer in charge of the Yard's investigation, Detective Inspector Noel Beswick, yesterday spoke to a local journalist who alleges that he was the victim of computer hacking during a meeting at a solicitor's office.

Inspector Beswick has already interviewed a former army intelligence agent Kevin Fulton who has made a formal complaint that his computer system was penetrated by an unknown hacker six years ago in a trawl for a document about the Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness.

Fulton told Beswick that he believes the hacker was looking for a document known as 'JJ8' which he hoped might be stored on his computer.

Fulton has alleged that material held on the computer, including emails, was obtained and passed to News International reporters.

Fulton made a complaint to the Police Ombudsman that in 2005 Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) officers had accessed his computer and provided material from it to journalists, but his complaint was rejected due to lack of evidence.

Inspector Beswick is expected to ask the PSNI to provide him with the computer they seized from Fulton during the raid on his London safe house so that experts can examine it to establish if a Trojan horse virus was put in it via an email to enable a hacker to have remote access.

Earlier this year Fulton's solicitor wrote to the Metropolitan police alleging that some of his emails had been intercepted in 2006.

Beswick replied in June saying that a small team of officers had been established by Scotland Yard to examine allegations that information had been obtained illegally by means other than voicemail which was being investigated under 'Operation Weeting'.

He said that Fulton's allegations fell into this category and would be examined under 'Operation Tuleta' by the Yard's SCD6 Economic and Specialist Crime unit.

It's understood that during the interview with Fulton a fortnight ago Inspector Beswick confirmed that his team had obtained material from News International's lawyers which corresponded with the contents of emails held on Fulton's computer.

Another former Army agent, who uses the pseudonym Sam Rosenfeld, is expected to make a statement to 'Operation Tuleta' officers next week to outline suspicions about the alleged obtaining of information from his computers in 2006.

Quote:Rupert Murdoch letter to News International staff 'full of legal errors'

Human rights lawyer says media mogul is not legally obliged to hand over evidence to police, and that doing so is unethical

Lisa O'Carroll
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 18 February 2012 12.53 GMT

Rupert Murdoch is not legally obliged to hand over evidence of wrongdoing in his newspapers to the police, contrary to claims he made in a letter to News International staff, a leading human rights lawyer has said.

Geoffrey Robertson has said that Murdoch's letter in relation to this issue "is full of errors, both of law and history".

He added that the media baron was "ill-advisedly and unethically throwing away the shield that parliament gave to journalists in 1984 so they could protect their sources".

On Friday, Murdoch told staff that his internal investigations unit, which had already handed over evidence that has led to the arrest of nine Sun journalists in the past month, would continue to disclose material to the police because the company was "obligated" to do so.

"We will turn over every piece of evidence we find not just because we are obligated to but because it is the right thing to do," Murdoch's email said.

He said he would "continue to ensure that all appropriate steps are taken to protect legitimate journalistic privilege and sources" but warned he "cannot protect people who have paid public officials".

Robertson said: "Apparently, he thinks it is right to hand over confidential source material including the names of whistleblowers to police without them even asking. This is a breach of the most fundamental ethic that journalists must not betray their source and there is no law that requires it.

"On the contrary, the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act defines confidential journalistic material as 'excluded material', which police cannot seize at all, other than in a few cases such as official secrets, when they have to get an order from a circuit judge."

In 1984, a delegation from the press, led by Lord MacGregor and including James Evans, the then-solicitor for Times Newspapers, and Geoffrey Robertson saw the home secretary in order to ensure that the 1984 Police Act provided a special procedure whereby confidential journalistic material could only be obtained by police applying to a circuit judge with proof that the public interest required them to have it. This doesn't apply, however, if a voluntarily give their documents to the police or invite police into their offices to take what they want."

News International insiders have expressed concern that Murdoch's letter to staff means that his policy of voluntarily handing over documents to the authorities has not changed, and it will continue to disclose sources in breach of the code of practice for journalists.

Robertson added: "What is so unattractive about Mr Murdoch's behaviour is that he is handing over journalists without ever asking them, or their editors, or their executives who must have signed off on the payments, what they were doing and whether they were genuinely pursuing a public interest story. Any significant payment must have been approved by executives, and News Corp does not appear to have turned them over."

He added: "The real danger of this behaviour is that it is a blow to investigative journalism, which depends on the cultivation of sources. "Whistleblowers will be much less likely to come forward, however much they trust the journalist, if they fear that his proprietor may turn them over to police."

"Everyone seems to have forgotten that over 200 years ago John Wilkes went to prison to stop government agents getting hold of his journalistic material without a specific warrant. He sued the government and won a great constitutional case. He would be turning in his grave."

Quote:Rupert Murdoch's spooky mission began during the Anglo-American coup d'etat in Australia. This is a little known event due, in large part, to its suppression by Murdoch media.